The Insider - January 2025

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In the company of optimists

In grad school, I studied anthropology and linguistics, a field taught mostly by Marxist professors. I had a professor who once said: “The best we can do as a civilization is manage the inevitable decline.” It wasn’t the most optimistic field of study. I learned two important lessons during this chapter in my life. The first was how impressionable I was. After full-day immersions studying how far we had strayed from the pre-American, pre-colonial, pre-capitalistic, pre-everything era when all of life was better, I would go home and find myself more irritable, more aware of life’s minor imperfections, less grateful.

The second lesson was how much I disliked spending my time criticizing. I wanted to be on the side of progress. Was there nothing I could do? In the anthropological retelling of history, human ambition was not a force to make things less harmful. Instead, it was at the heart of civilization’s decline. The desire for greatness was our interminable illness, not a way forward. I finished my degree and chose social entrepreneurship, a field brimming with ambition where I could be in the company of optimists.

I hadn’t thought much about my experience in grad school until I read an article in The Free Press this month entitled “How MAGA Won the ‘Sensitive Young Man’”. So many un-MAGA-like people tilted toward Trump in 2024. Reading this article helped me add a layer of nuance to that shift: outside of a left-right paradigm of politics and policies, there is something more human that people use to find their community, identify their affiliations, and discover their vocation: Can I be great, and can I be a part of something great? Is it okay to be ambitious in the direction of unpoliced progress? Do I belong in the company of people who have hope?

On wasting time with AI

I’ve always felt vaguely worried that I’m missing out on something big when I hear psychologist Amos Tversky's quote, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” What is lost in my relentless pursuit of optimization and productivity? Could I be climbing the wrong mountain? It’s damn hard to carve out the space to get lost wasting hours. But I’ve found that my best ideas and clearest thinking come from moments of idleness or wandering.

How many years are we wasting by not messing around with the latest AI tools and agents? Reading about OpenAI’s newest AI agent product, Deep Research, I was stunned by AI’s “jagged frontier.” It seems like one of the best ways to use AI right now is not as a lowly intern or an all-knowing oracle, but as a peer—to recognize it as a partner in creating a co-intelligence between human and machine. Looking back, the hours I’ve spent wasting with AI have had a common theme: I come to it asking for help and admitting how little I know. “How do I do this?” I prompt. “What does this mean?” I confess. “If I wanted to string together these steps, could an agent do it?” If anything, the time spent messing around has challenged me to think of my professional contributions not as simply a product of my judgment or work ethic, but as the result of a partnership where I play one role.

On wildfires

Nothing has captured my attention in the last month like the Los Angeles wildfires. It’s an event with a million storylines: the human stories of heartbreak and loss, the insurance stories of growing premiums and reduced coverage, the political stories of firefighters, downed power lines, and insolvent state-backed insurance plans. 

It’s hard not to think that the LA fires could be a harbinger of what’s to come—that somehow they are a flare from our future where more frequent disasters cost us billions and fray the social, political, and economic fabric that holds communities together. If there is a meta-takeaway from the fires, it might be that we’ve entered into a new era where we’re fully aware that no one is coming to save us. I saw this again and again on social media: people trying to defend their own homes, people offering to pay any price for private firefighters, people installing sprinklers on their roofs, people taking their evacuation and safety into their own hands, people making citizen arrests of arsonists. The social contract between homeowner and insurance company is breaking: with high premiums and more exclusions, having insurance doesn’t provide the coverage or peace of mind it used to. The social contract between residents and their local officials is breaking: people can’t trust that the fire hydrants will work or officials will show up. All of this might fit inside of the bigger trend of the loss of trust in our institutions. 

Without that trust, when we realize that those institutions aren’t there to protect us and no one is coming to save us, it becomes clear that it’s up to us. The strength of our democracy depends on our trust in our institutions; without that trust, a society that can tip into vigilantism and isolation.

In the wake of the fires, I’ve seen articles exploring how people are leaving areas prone to disasters to more climate-resilient cities and zip codes. It’s part of a trend that the book On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America lays out. But I wonder if the actual migration won’t be to climate-resilient zip codes, but to places where people still trust their local institutions. Yes, insurance might be a written policy, but it is also something deeper: the met expectations that local institutions will perform, that people will show up, that the social contracts we make will remain in place when everything else goes up in smoke.

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What I am reading

• When you step off the career ladder, you land in status limbo. A reflection on status and the counterintuitive maneuver of giving up status to get status. Working Theories Substack.
• An exploration of “Wild clocks”—the traits that enable living things to coordinate their way of life with the world around them. “Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene.” Emergence Magazine.
• From DeepSeek to TikTok, Chinese tech is on the global stage. I loved this collection of articles by Rest of World on China’s tech ecosystem, its tech talent, its tech exports, and what it means for the rest of us. Rest of World.
• The new rules of media. 20 lessons for digital media’s present and future. One Thing Substack.
• Dispatch from India: India extracts more groundwater than any other country worldwide. The downstream effects of India’s green revolution mean that decades of monocropping have taken a toll on water resources and the health of farm communities. Undark.
• Dispatch from Canada: The northern tip of mainland Canada is a paradise of caribou, polar bears, and Arctic char. So far mining hasn’t reached it and locals are fighting to keep it that way. Canadian Geographic.

Something personal

On a remote beach in Baja, just past the break, she arched her back out of the water. An 80,000-pound, 50-foot gray whale. A fellow mammal. We were both headed in the same direction: I, on a short walk along the beach. She, on a 12,000 mile migration that traced the pacific coastline from Alaska to Baja.

My walking pace was dictated by what was on my mind. I had a busy week ahead. The to-do lists, the commitments, the meetings, the coordination—all of it led to fast steps and shorter breaths. The pace of my body matching the pace of my mind.

She seemed less frenetic. For every 100 steps I took, she would surface just once, her dark skin, marred and weathered, gently rising above the waves in one smooth crescent-shaped motion. For every 100 breaths I took, she let out just one long exhale from her spout.

Two mammals moving at very different paces. One, an optimizing sprinter who is always looking for ways to do and achieve more. The other, a 12,000-mile marathoner less concerned with trying to squeeze every productivity gain out of life, but instead perfectly content doing what she was made to do: breathe in, breathe out, mile after mile, slow and steady.

~~~~

From Colorado,

Banks